Facing down Facebook

Guy BergerConference on Journalism Education

and Training: The Challenges16 October 2008, Stellenbosch.

In a nutshell

1. Introduction – the issues2. New generation students3. New media world4. Convergence & the curriculum5. Problematising pedagogy 6. Conclusion

Take a test… who is:

• Jimmy Wales? Tip: Volunteers create free content.• Mark Zuckerberg? Tip: Friends make him money.• Craig Newmark? Tip: Free service killing a class!• Larry Page and Sergey Brin? Tip: Sidewinders.• Ann Droid? Tip: get mobilised.

1. Introduction – the issues

• Facing up to change; Facing down hype.• Not forgetting African contexts.

• Being upfront that we are teaching history: journalism as it has been.

• Future-focused … for an uncertain future! (Just 5 years ago, mp3s were seen as geeky).

• An age of j-educational uncertainties…

2. New generation students

• Rupert Murdoch (2005): digital natives and digital immigrants.

• (Journ educators: digital refugees?)• Young people take to digital social networks

like Facebook and Mxit. Africa too!• How many j-educators efface themselves?

• Do we know the social capital circulating there – bonding versus bridging?

The “challenge”?

• How do educators teach the next generation of media leaders about an environment that many of us do not understand, but that is second nature to students? (Jude Mathurine, 2008a).

• In South Africa, we have the “born-frees” – should we also talk about “born digitals”?

And new aspirations

• “I hate journalism schools - they just send cattle to the slaughter house.”

http://angryjournalist.com/ Angry Journalist #5911:

BUT: here’s the irony:• “College students in America are not as

‘digital’ as we might wish to pretend.” (Vaidhyanathan 2008)

• “Despite the ubiquitous presence of the Web, many j-students think traditionally, identifying themselves as magazine writers or broadcast journalists. They are also frustrated with a multimedia approach that stresses flexibility over competence in a single medium.” Dave Boeyink, Indiana University

+ More irony

• “Students were not as enthusiastic about new media instruction as we had thought. Print students complained about being forced to take broadcast production and both print and broadcast students said they resented being forced to study online topics.” (Larry Pryor, USC, 2005)

Even more irony!

• “Everyone is on Facebook or MySpace, but only five or so of the approximately 400 students that I've taught over the last five years had their own website, which featured their writing samples, articles, or other work.” (Larry Atkins, Temple University, Arcadia University)

• “They use wikipedia, not knowing what’s a wiki.” (Rebecca McKinnon, Hong Kong).

Summing up

• There’s a gap between perception & reality.• It doesn’t mean students are not different to

us … but how much are they different?• To what extent are we all in the same boat? (albeit in different positions).

• What value-add proposition do we bring?

3. New (?) media*

• “Journalism is changing from a lecture to a conversation” (Dan Gillmor). (And education?)

• “The people formerly known as the audience” (Is it now also ‘former’ students & teachers?)

• The business model is in crisis (jobs?)

* “New Media Matters”, 2001: ‘interactive, m-media’

Journalism is separated from media

• And there is no longer or everywhere a clear distinction between those who gathered content, and those who delivered it.

• Input and output are no longer necessarily discrete operations by discrete people.

• Media houses are moving to multiple media plus to include multi-media within the mix.

• Can’t dodge the tech, but it also becomes anachronistic. Example: SMS is doomed.

Conversation, not content, is kingPRODUCTION:

• OSS & Internet-isation & media-tisation

• From public/private to private=publicCONSUMPTION:

• Success = enable users to take control of information (eg. Google)

• From info to comms… passive choice to … customising, personalising, interacting.

Web 2.0

“Social networking has already moved from a trend to create a virtual teenage bedroom wall to something far more functional – a rich, personalised and multipurpose hub for communication and organisation.” (NUJ, 2007)

Social networking

• “Journalists, probably even more than most other workers, are beginning to use such sites as Myspace, Facebook and Bebo, as a source of material as well as social networking. The NUJ has one of the biggest union groups on Facebook in the world, with well over 1,000 members.”

• USA: www.newmediadons.org

Work’s changing• Amateurs & organisations are also

reporters and commentators.

• Readers are editing – voting the most popular content.

• Aggregators are packaging & disseminating.• “Distribution has become part of a journalist’s

job description, whether they realise it or not.” (Paul Bradshaw)

• Fast emerging: mapping and geotagging

Flux

• “Fundamental implications for one’s professional identity…. and careers (where the vast majority of new media reporters and editors … constantly switch employers, jobs, are employed through part-time so-called ‘flexible’ contracts…). (Mark Deuze, 2006).

Employment

• New jobs: taggers, community gardeners, mash-up editor.

• “A course I am teaching … is designed to help students invent their own jobs, which is not only a good idea, but probably an essential skill for journalists …” (Dan Gillmor).

New genres & behaviours

• “Online video is not TV news, Broadband has mean flash animation, panoramic video and 3-D imagery, leading to experiments around ‘gaming the news’. There are also immersive environments and relational databases, and 24 hour news cycles.” (Larry Pryor, 2006)

• Less gates for quality control, more space for plagiarism and fakery.

Convergence & confusion• Newsrooms have begun to treat convergence

differently, to see it as a solar system of loosely connected functions, rather than a hard-wired fusion of media. (Pryor, 2006).

• Clashing cultures (Hermida & Thurman)…

• What does industry expect of our grads? • Does j-ed follow or lead?• And what about servicing working

journos as per UNESCO criterion area B?

4. Curriculum implications

• 71 US J-schools: Of the seven convergence skills surveyed, most important are seen as collaboration skills, the ability to write across platforms, and multiplatform story planning (Wenger and VanSlyke Turk, 2005)

• African j-schools – still wrestling with other skills: language, HIV-Aids, peace journalism.

The squeeze is on

• “How to make room for convergence in an already-crowded curriculum. Where does it fit? What has to be dropped? What will it cost? Is it worth it?” (Larry Pryor, 2005).

• Too much to teach, too little time. And that leads to student anxiety. The new multimedia course only allows three or four weeks on each kind of writing. That frustrates students looking for an early dose of competence. (Dave Boeyink, Indiana University, 2005)

71 US J-schools

• If a “converged curriculum” means all students learning how to generate news content for print, broadcast, and online, then on that definition:

• 12.7 % schools said highly converged, and• 22.2 % not converged at all. • 65.1 % fall within the category of somewhat to

moderately converged.

And the staff?

• 81% said that a significant or very significant challenge is that faculty lack the skills needed to teach across platforms.

• 35 % said that a lack of funding for training faculty is a very significant challenge.

And when to do it?

• “Converge at the beginning, converge at the end, converge throughout, or don’t converge at all! If you can say one thing about convergence in the college curriculum, it is that one size does not fit all.” (Wenger and VanSlyke Turk, 2005)

WJEC wisdom on theory needed:

• Digital history, open source software, community theory, censorship, privacy, strategy, audience consumption and production, business models, identity, Information Society and Knowledge Economy theories plus knowledge management, globalisation issues (ICANN, WSIS, development, democracy, digital divides, hyperlocalism).

More WJEC

• Law and ethics - intellectual property (copyright and creative commons), defamation.

• Research issues really NB – building the knowledge base. eg. audience measurement, eye-track, ethnographics, online tools and resources, changing news consumption habits, revenue issues.

What else?

• Creative Destruction in the media industry• Cultural & Geographic Variations • How do the Economics of and Laws about

New Media Differ from Traditional?• Alphabet Soup, Metadata, and Web 3.0• Paid Content, Permission, & Personalization.(Vin Crosbie, Syracuse University)

More:

• Social Media & Virtual Worlds • Streaming Media, Metrics & RSS• Search Engines & Optimization(Vin Crosbie)• (SEO is especially relevant to Africa! – GB)• Reading, 'riting... and revenue? Online

publishing changes the 'three Rs' for college students (Larry Atkins, OJR)

mindymcadams.com/tojou

• Create a 2-minute audio clip with clear nat sound, narration and interview material, edited digitally and compressed for the Web.

• Shoot, edit & compress a video of 2 min • Create and maintain a single-subject blog for

at least eight weeks (minimum 16 posts), with at least two posts per week.

• Create a 1:30 to 2 min Soundslides presentation that tells a journalistic story.

Ethics

• Advertising interference in editorial• Hidden bias or manipulation by the journalist• Image and audio manipulation• Staged or posed events (video, audio, photo)(Mindy McAdams)• Relations to bottom line – be critical,

independent. • Help to grow alternative media.

On the up-side

• The criticism that many journalism teachers haven’t set foot in a newsroom for years begins to fade. The change levels out the relevance of fresh experience vs archives – because so much is new and unfolding.

• That’s terrifically exciting!

What’s the j-educators’ value-add?

• Jude Mathurine: Assessment – looking for, and judging, the journalism (2008c).

• To this extent, the journalistic basics remain: research, writing, accuracy, presentation, public interest…

• “Convergence demands a rethink of what we mean by media, the role of journalism in our society, and how we teach our courses and specialisations.” (Mathurine 2008a).

5. Pedagogy problematised

• Teaching changes• So does journalism

WJEC advice

Pedagogy itself needs to take account of:• Access to online resources and training

opportunities• Delivering education with the aid of online

courses and tools• Building creative learning and exercises• Treating students as teachers.

Dan Gillmor

• People teaching journalism today are well advised to learn from their students. Freshmen arriving at university today are far ahead of senior students when it comes to understanding the techniques, although not the art, of creating media. That means a lot of skills to teach to students, but also a lot for the teachers to learn from their students. (cited by Goldstuck 2008)

Formerly known as lecturers

• Classes become “not information transfer, but facilitation” (Jonathan Charles Hewett, City University, cited in Hume, 2007:23)

• BUT: teachers have to be custodians of journalism – even as its meaning also mutates, merges, moves on… (eg. Non-linear, mixing attitude, “random acts”)

Rich Gordon: Medill• Graduate students majoring in new media,

do an “innovation project” where they have to create a new digital or cross-media product.

• “I've challenged the team to look at improving ‘conversations around news’ -- to use digital community-building tools to enhance people's connections to their local communities and to news and information about those communities.”

http://crunchberry.org/

• And Medill is also doing locative journalism.

Paul Bradshaw

Maps, mashups and multimedia: online journalism students tackle interactivity:

• Kasper Sorensen created a map of water issues stories in Europe

• Ashley Snape created a map of Environmental Activity in Australasia

• Natalie Chillington created a slideshow of the top 10 endangered animals

More of what they did:Alice Fanning not only created a map of UK environmental protests but also a Yahoo! Pipe mashup of eco news.Emma Foster created an audio slideshow - ‘Tescopoly’ - and a map of eco-businesses in the UK.Hayley Smith created a Yahoo! Pipes mashup of environmental technology news, alerts and photos.

More:

• Stephanie Grant created an audio slideshow to mark African Liberation Day

• Tuuli Platner stole the show with her YouTube video song promoting the site and her reporter blog. Journalists are becoming brands, and Tuuli has understood that brilliantly.

Being in Bradshaw’s class

• In addition the class submitted stories from their blogs and from the Environmental News Online website; their Twitter tweets and their bookmarks; their rss reader subscriptions and their comments on other blogs.

• You could say I’m quite demanding like that.

6. Conclusion

• “Allow for convergence to be contested by students, educators, industry partners, and other stakeholders within their school, program, or course—because it will be in practice, and this will give people a sense of agency in the process.” (Mark Deuze)

Summing upOLD NEW

Curriculum Silos, institutionally oriented

Medium oriented

Pedagogy Transfer Explore

Technology Analogue, linear, elite means of production

Digital, interactive, more accessible

Face it – we’ve got a lot to learn!